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Bell, the tearful ballad which first brought him popular applause, being typical. A strong inclination for the purely sensuous and beautiful no doubt led him into some early extravagances, but these he afterwards carefully pruned away, so that his later work shows a marked restraint and refinement. He confesses that at one time he was entranced by mere external beauty of form and rhythm, but that in his maturer attitude toward his art he cared more for the grace and beauty that dwell with unadorned truth. There seems to be little question, however, but that Aldrich's work as a whole is overdone in its refinement and classic polish. Out of the many volumes of poetry and prose which he published, there must be selected a comparatively small volume of his songs and sonnets as his permanent contribution to our poetry. His two notable prose successes, The Story of a Bad Boy (1869) and Marjorie Daw (1873), both delightful narratives, will doubtless continue to hold a high place among the best American stories.

J. G. Holland. Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819-1881) belongs to the older school of New England poets, though he was born as late as 1819, the year in which Lowell was born. He wrote books of many kinds and was a successful lyceum lecturer. His long narrative poems, Bitter-Sweet (1858) and Katrina (1867), reached a circulation of more than a hundred thousand copies each, and it may be said that they deserve the broad popular approval which they attained. Some passages from his longer poems, such, for example, as the cradle song from Bitter-Sweet, beginning, What is the little one thinking about? Very wonderful things, no doubt!

Unwritten history!

Unfathomed mystery!

Yet he laughs and cries, and eats and drinks,
And chuckles and crows, and nods and winks,

As if his head were as full of kinks

And curious riddles as any sphinx!

have become popular through frequent quotation and declamation; and many of his shorter poems have secured a similar place of fixed popularity in the general mind of our citizenship, such, for example, as the following wellknown poem in irregular sonnet form:

WANTED

God give us men! A time like this demands

Strong minds, great hearts, true faith, and ready hands;

Men whom the lust of office does not kill;

Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;

Men who possess opinions and a will;

Men who have honor.- men who will not lie;

Men who can stand before a demagogue,

And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking!
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog

In public duty, and in private thinking:

For while the rabble, with their thumb-worn creeds,
Their large professions and their little deeds,—
Mingle in selfish strife, lo! Freedom weeps,

Wrong rules the land, and waiting Justice sleeps!

After he was fifty Dr. Holland became editor of Scribner's Monthly and lived in New York, but his most significant work was produced in New England.

Women poets. New England has been particularly productive of women poets of merit. Foremost among these should be named Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), who was engaged in the abolition and other reform movements and wrote several plays, much general prose, and many poems. Her "Battle Hymn of the Republic," written early in the Civil War under the stress of intense emotion, patriotic fervor, and religious ecstasy, is the only production of Mrs. Howe's which has survived in popular favor. Other women poets are Lucy Larcom (1826-1893), a cotton-mill worker of Lowell, Massachusetts, who wrote many pleasing but light and sometimes over-sentimental poems for children; Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), a recluse of Amherst, Massachusetts,

author of a number of very short and tense but strikingly original lyrics; and Celia Thaxter (1836-1894), the daughter of a lighthouse keeper and author of highly colored but vivid prose in her volume called Among the Isles of Shoals, and of several wellnigh flawless sea poems, such as "The Sandpiper." Celia Thaxter's lyrics are especially suitable for young readers, and they have been frequently included in juvenile reading books. Anna Hempstead Branch, of Connecticut, is one of the most promising of the younger women poets who have not allied themselves with the imagists or writers of free-verse. She published a prize poem, "The Road 'Twixt Heaven and Hell," in The Century Magazine in 1898. She has since issued three volumes of excellent poetry-The Heart of the Road (1901), The Shoes that Danced (1905), and The Rose of the Wind (1910).1

Some minor poets. Among the minor poets of the New England states, mention should be made of Samuel Francis Smith (1808-1895), of Boston, a Baptist minister who wrote several familiar hymns but whose greatest success was his song which has become the best known of our patriotic hymns- namely, "America";2 Jones Very (1813-1880), a native of Salem, graduate of Harvard, member of the transcendental group, and author of a large number of graceful short poems and sonnets; John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887), of Vermont, a clever writer of humorous verse; Thomas William Parsons (1819-1892), of Massachusetts, author of an excellent translation of Dante's Inferno and a number of other poetical works of a distinctly high quality;

1 See note on p. 140.

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2 S. F. Smith was a member of the famous Harvard class of 1829, and is referred to as follows by Oliver Wendell Holmes in the poem, The Boys," read at the reunion of the class on its thirtieth anniversary:

And here's a nice youngster of excellent pith,—
Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith:
But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,—
Just read on his medal, "My Country of thee!"

and George Edward Woodberry (1855-), of Massachusetts, for a number of years connected with Columbia University in New York as professor of comparative literature, equally praised as a critic and general essayist and as a poet, particularly as a poet of broad patriotism and philosophic insight into modern life.

THE NEW POETRY IN NEW ENGLAND

Edwin Arlington Robinson. Among the score or more of the recent New England poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson (186935, Robert Frost, and Amy Lowell may be singled out for special consideration. Mr. Robinson was born in Maine and educated at Harvard, though on account of the decline of his father's health he left college before he graduated. His first volume of poetry was called The Children of the Night (1897), a rather gloomy book, though full of promise. It contains some short character sketches in a somewhat cynical mood, suggestive of the similar later work of Edgar Lee Masters. Then he went to New York to try to make his way by writing. In 1902 he published a volume called Captain Craig, containing several long poems in blank verse and a sheaf of lyrics and sonnets and adaptations from the Greek. His third volume, The Town Down the River, made up chiefly of character studies, appeared in 1910, and his fourth, The Man Against the Sky, in 1916. It will be seen that Mr. Robinson has published rather slowly, but he has shown a steady growth in his art, and in this last volume he has reached a decidedly high level of poetic power. Particularly in the poem “Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford" has he succeeded in presenting a lively and vigorous portrait of two notable characters in English literature-namely, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. The title poem, too, “The Man Against the Sky," and the character sketch "Flammonde" are excellent poems. Says Miss Lowell: "Mr. Robinson

deals with something which may fitly be called raw human nature, but human nature simple, direct, and as it is. Those last three words contain the gist of the whole matter. In them lies Mr. Robinson's gift to the 'New Poetry'; simple, direct, and as it is."1

Robert Frost. Robert Frost (1875-), though born in California, was educated in New England and finally married and engaged in farming and teaching here and there in New Hampshire. He lived in England from 1912 to 1915, and here his first volume, A Boy's Will (1913), was published and warmly praised by the English reviewers. Upon his return to America he intended to retire to his farm, but he was called from his retreat to become professor of literature at Amherst College in Massachusetts. He has studied very closely the strange psychology and habits of the surviving types of the earlier New England rural population. In the poems in North of Boston (1914) and Mountain Intervals (1916), the author sedulously avoids all of the ordinary poetic diction and ornamentation, and his style is notably frank and sincere in the presentation of the simple New Hampshire rural life. But over all the familiar and commonplace incidents which he chooses to write about, Mr. Frost manages to cast the soft light of genuine poetry. He merely portrays the ordinary daily tasks, such as the mending of a broken wall, harvesting the apples, or picking the blueberries, presenting them from the farmer's simple, human point of view; and under the realism of his homely style these everyday incidents take on a genuine poetic coloring and prove to be subjects well worthy of poetic treatment.

Amy Lowell. Miss Lowell (1874-) is a member of the famous Abbott Lowell family. One of her brothers, A. L. Lowell, is president of Harvard University Another was

1Tendencies of Modern American Poetry, p. 52.

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